Little Carnegie Theatre

Woody’s most cerebral comedy went wide along UA’s “Red Carpet” on 12/12/80 while continuing at the Little Carnegie and other select theaters:

Stardust Memories

I saw this one at the Century’s Meadows Twin and I can recall a sequence wherein Woody’s character (a famous director being fetted to a weekend retrospective of his work – particularly the “earlier funny ones”) is shot by a fan with a gun … and there was an audible gasp from the audience as John Lennon had only been gunned down by a crazed fan days before.

Reminds me of a time I saw “How I Won the War” – featuring Lennon in a supporting role – at the Hollywood Twin on 8th Avenue in the very early ‘80’s. There’s a scene in that film where he is felled by schrapnel and the audience reaction revealed how fresh and raw the psychic wounds of his death still were at the time.

Paul, that Chaplin re-issue series played at the Plaza, not the Little Carnegie. I remember seeing a number of them there, including City Lights at a late show. And I believe it was in the 1960s.

Excuse me, that’s the Carnegie Hall Cinema on 7th Avenue AT 57th Street.

Gerald—

Thanks for the info: ars longa, vita brevis, so I’ll probably not get to view this film again.

Corrections to my post above: I just consulted the NY Times of 12 June ‘61 with its review of “Frantic.” The film pre-dated Malle’s “Lovers,” but the latter raeched NY first. According to the plot summary, the person stuck in the elevator was not Moreau, but her lover who had just murdered her husband; while he was stuck there, a couple of kids stole his car and then murdered someone else, thereby making him the prime suspect in that crime. Gee, but those New Wavers loved Hitchcock!

About the Playhouse/Cinema handle: Though Hagstrom’s Atlas names the theater on Seventh Avenue “Carnegie Hall Playhouse,” the NY Times on the above date advertises “White Nights” playing there at the “Carnegie Hall Cinema.” So, Gerald, at least for the time-frame recounted here, you are right. I don’t know when “Playhouse” got attached to either that theater or to the Little Carnegie on E 57 Street.

Warren—

I’d forgotten about those Baro-coco feathers at the sides of the proscenium! The old Globe (now Lunt-Fontanne) had similar decoration that survived that theater’s transition from movie to legit in ‘58.

And, yes, “Rashomon played there when it opened in ‘50 (though I was too young to see it at the time: I recall, however, that a dubbed version of the latter went on to travel through the RKO nabe circuit). Among films I recall seeing at the Little C were "Tunes of Glory” and “Frantic,” the latter Louis Malle’s first feature, with a very young Jeanne Moreau and a suspenseful scene with her stuck in a tiny French elevator.

By the way, the correct name of this theater is “Little Carnegie Theater,” not at all to be confused with “Carnegie Hall Playhouse” around the corner. Warren and Gerald: You both make different points in your posts of 18 March 2004. Hagstrom’s Atlas of 1961 identifies those theaters (at least at that time) by the titles I have given. “Cinema” might have been attached to one or the other at some later period. But “Playhouse” was definitely the handle of the theater on Seventh Ave. in the early ‘60s.

That’s a wonderful program! “Anna” received a big distribution in (was it?) ‘54 when it had been dubbed and circulated across the RKO nabes circuit. I remember seeing it at the RKO Dyker, against my parents’ wishes (“All those Italian films are immoral”—that about the land of the popes). I told them I was going to the Alpine to see “I Love Melvin,” or something like it, but went to the steamy Dyker instead. Hot stuff. A clip from it surfaced in “Cinema Paradiso” decades later, suggesting that it was a big hit in the papal territories as well. By the time “Umberto D” came to Brooklyn (to the venerable Astor on Flatbush Avenue), I was in h.s. and a regular patron of that theater.

In 1939 when the Wizard of Oz left the Capitol it moved here.

Barton, I placed “Eclipse” on my list recently. I keep adding. I love the movie a great deal and showed it when I used to run the Italian Film Society of RI from 1981 to 1996. I still have the little four-page program booklet the Little Carnegie distributed at that film. Martin Scorsese includes a nice tribute to “Eclipse” in his “My Voyage to Italy,” now available on DVD. Another thing I liked about the Little Carnegie, besides what you mention, was the very plush and spacious lobby/waiting area. It began to the rear of the auditorium and then went left along the side.

According to a review of “Ten Days that Shook the World” in the New York Times, the theatre opened on November 2,1928 with that silent Russian film by Sergei Eisenstein. The review by Mordaunt Hall bears the heading “New Little Cinema Opens” and mentions that part of the theatre was once Roger Wolfe Kahn’s Le Perroquet Club de Paris, with an entrance on 56th Street. The space was expanded to create the cinema and the entrance was transferred to 57th Street, just a few yards from Carnegie Hall.

When the people who ran the Angelika Film Center at the time purchased the lease for the former Biograph Cinema (which I believe was previously known as the New Carnegie), the moniker they gave it was Angelika 57, not Angelika West. (The last feature to screen at the Angelika 57, BTW, was Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Good Bye Mozart’.)

No, Savage, the Biograph was further west from the Little Carnegie, on 57th near Broadway and right near Hard Rock Cafe'. I believe it started out as the Lincoln Art in the 1960s, and I remember seeing a good number of movies there in my visits to New York, including Fellini’s THE CLOWNS. For a long stretch it was the Bombay Cinema, showing films from India. The Little Carnegie was a block east, a couple of doors down from Carnegie Hall.

Remember seeing Antonioni’s The Passenger there in 1975…In its waning days of the 70s Walter Reade would day date this theatre a lot with the Coronet or Baronet on the East Side